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Acer Aspire One 722 Ubuntu 11.04 fixes

About a week ago, I bought Acer Aspire One 722. After initial installation of Ubuntu 11.04, I had a couple of problems/annoyances, and I managed to solve them. This is a list of fixes that I applied:

1. Freezing after login (with unplugged network cable). This is caused by wireless driver. Easy fix is to make network boot as a first option in BIOS (hold F2 after reboot). The solution for this was found on:

2. Better power management. For now, AMD's Catalyst driver doesn't support sleep mode on this netbook (computer freezes on wake-up), but open source Radeon does, and this is why I choosed it. This driver has options for reduced power consumption, but they are not activated by default. To make laptop battery lasts longer, I installed Jupiter. To do this, open terminal and type:

Don't close the terminal yet. Start the program (Alt+F2, type jupiter-run), and it will add itself to list of allowed programs for systray, and also to startup applications. Beacuse Jupiter (version 0.0.50) still doesn't have options for OSS Radeon driver power management, I added them manually (version 0.0.51 has this fix already included, thanks to fuduntu, so if you have this version, there is nothing more to do for step 2). To do this, on the same terminal type:

3. Touchpad rotating together with screen rotating. 722 netbook is very suitable to be used as a ebook reader, simply by rotating it's screen by 90 degrees (it comes natural to hold it as a book). Jupiter has nice options for screen rotating, but there is one slight annoyance: when you select different screen orientation, and rotate netbook accordingly, the touchpad movement remains unchanged, and it becomes difficult to navigate. This is solved with latest patches for xorg's synaptics driver. To get the updated driver, open terminal and type:

4. Headphone sensing and internal microphone. In default Ubuntu 11.04 on 722, when you plug your headphones, the sound from speakers isn't turned off and internal microphone isn't working. To solve these issues, download and install (by double-clicking on it):

This patch is actually for another Acer laptop, but I found that it solves the same problem on 722. There are however, two caveats for this. First, external microphone still isn't working, and second, if internal microphone still isn't working, you'll need to go to Sound preferences/Input and mute and then unmute microphone (to enable internal microphone, in Sound Preferences/Hardware "Internal Audio" must be selected, and "Analog Stereo Duplex" profile. On input tab, "Internal microphone" connector should be selected, and Input volume should be adjusted to about 100%). With this fix, Skype and Google Talk/Video work just fine. Details about this fix can be found at:

5. CapsLock indicator. 722 doesn't have keyboard LED indicators, which can be quite annoying, especially with CapsLock. To solve this I installed keylock indicator (by T. Scott Barnes). To do this, open terminal, and type:

Instead of indicator-keylock-ubuntu-mono, you could use indicator-keylock-humanity or indicator-keylock-elementary (or, you could install them all). After this, open Startup Applications (from System Settings), click on Add, and enter "KeyLock Indicator" for Name and "/usr/bin/indicator-keylock" for Command (without quotes). To start indicator immediately, press Alt+F2 and enter indicator-keylock.

6. Multitouch gestures. 722 has a multitouch touchpad, and I found two-finger scrolling quite natural to use. You can enable it by going to Mouse/Touchpad setings (in Control Centre). Select Two-finger scrolling, and enable Horizontal scrolling.

7. Slow Unity with Catalyst drivers. When I tried Catalyst drivers, the Unity was slower than with OSS driver. To solve this issue, install CCSM (Compiz Config Settings Manager, it can be found in default repository), and make these changes:

Code:

In CCSM/Composite: disable Detect Refresh Rate
In CCSM/OpenGL: disable Sync to Vblanc and set texture filter to fast
In Catalyst Control Center in display options disable Tear Free

After returning to OSS driver, I left the first two fixes (I didn't test if they actually make Unity faster, but they don't slow it down). I found about this fix at:

8. Power regression in Linux kernel. The good people at Phoronix found that Linux since version 2.6.38 on many computers has a 10-30% bigger power consumption than previous versions. They found a couple of reasons for this, but the main one was different handling of ASPM (Active-State Power Management). To solve this issue, you need to edit /etc/default/grub file. To do so, open terminal and type:

Code:

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Now, find the line

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

and change it to

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pcie_aspm=force"

Save the file, close gedit and type:

Code:

sudo update-grub

After that, restart computer. More details about this fix can be found at: